Category: Tech news

 Wikipedia has today made a significant update to its iOS application, which most noticeably features a cleaner, “distraction-free” design, as well as the ability to edit Wikipedia articles from your smartphone or tablet device. Under the hood, the app received a number of other improvements as well, including speed increases, offline access, a reading history, and more. Read More

 San Francisco is a great town for foodies and Forage, the brainchild of Foodzie founders Rob and Emily LaFave has emerged as an option for those who want to cook their favorite restaurant dishes at home. The service, which launches today, gathers all the ingredients used in selected restaurant recipes and hand-delivers them right to your door. The promise is that amateur chefs will be able to… Read More

 Up until today, Hulu’s mobile app was mostly useless for anyone who didn’t want to cough up 8 bucks a month for Hulu Plus. You were free to watch ad-supported shows on your computer’s browser — but once you went mobile, you were out of luck.
Seems Hulu is reconsidering that approach. Read More

 Microsoft lost an appeal today, as a federal judge ordered that it must comply with a U.S. warrant seeking email data on servers located in Ireland. During this process, it has been Microsoft’s contention that a warrant issued by the U.S. doesn’t have legal standing because the data being sought is stored abroad. Judge Loretta A. Preska disagrees. Read More

 There’s Bitcoin, the asset and hedge against fiat currencies and the politics of their central banks. And then there’s Bitcoin, a fundamental innovation around a distributed public ledger of transactions. Many crypto-currencies try to split or play with the distinction between the two. An early attempt was the Ripple, from OpenCoin. But the team behind that startup split.… Read More

 Snapchat’s VP of Engineering, Peter Magnusson, has left the company only six months after the L.A.-based startup was able to poach him away from Google. Magnusson was a particularly high-profile win for the ephemeral messaging app maker, as he had previously headed up Google’s App Engine, a cloud-based platform that counts Snapchat as one of its largest customers. Read More

 One of the most important things a small business manager can do is make sure that everyone is taking on a fair share of the workload. If some are taking on a bigger share of the work than others, it can lead to hurt feelings and inefficiency. Timely is an app that hopes to make that task easier to manage by thinking about how much time everyone is spent on work in total. Read More

 Pure Storage is upending the enterprise storage industry by fully utilizing flash memory technology into their product. Scott Dietzen, the current CEO of Pure Storage, and Mike Speiser, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, are working together to grow Pure Storage into an industry leader in flash-based enterprise data storage and they’ll be joining us onstage at Disrupt SF 2014. Read More

 Self-driving cars are making their way to Florida. Well, to “connected car” testbeds in Florida, that is.
Automaker Audi was recently the first to try out a section of highway in Tampa, which has been designated by the state as a testbed for automated driving. Here, Audi tested an initial version of “Piloted Driving” – something it calls “Traffic Jam… Read More

 When Jason Citron launched Fates Forever in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, it was impressive but many would say they weren’t surprised. Gamers have undoubtably heard of Jason’s previous success, OpenFeint, one of the first and most significant social platforms for mobile games on iOS and Android. Basically the Xbox live for the iPhone. Not bad for a 24-year-old. Read More

 Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp, a Boise, Idaho-based startup billed as a “Pandora for Books,” is a key move in the battle over the future of our printed-and-bound friends. When we combine this information with the rumors swirling around a potential smartwatch product from Apple, we can start to gaze into the future of publishing. Read More

 Over the next few days, Facebook will stop allowing messaging in its main iPhone and Android apps, and force all their users around the world to download its standalone Messenger app. Facebook first started requiring users in Europe to use Messenger back in April, but after seeing “positive results” in terms of engagement, its rolling out the plan to the everyone. Facebook tells… Read More

 We’ve got details regarding the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon you’ll want to hear. You wouldn’t want to miss out on one of the greatest all-night hacking events on the planet, would you? The Disrupt Hackathon is the all-weekend event that kicks off TechCrunch Disrupt. Starting on Saturday, September 6th at 12:30pm, hackers will have 24-hours(ish) to build a… Read More

 In early 2014, a number of high-profile acquisitions were locked in at prices that many found confusing. The good times are probably coming back.
Companies that compete across numerous technology strata like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are trading near record highs — or at least, the highest prices they’ve seen in a decade.
Those same companies are all incredibly cash-rich. Read More

 Newcomers to Silicon Valley are often shocked at how appallingly bad the transit options between San Francisco and the rest of the region can be. It’s a legacy of fragmented regional governance where nine different counties created at least 10 different semi-overlapping public rail and bus systems. BART was originally going to connect the entire region but two counties dropped out in… Read More